SLO LIFE FebMar2021

| PUBLISHER’S MESSAGE
After a long walk home from school, I would drop my backpack and Dukes of Hazzard lunch pail at the end of
our driveway and scoop up the sun-bleached red, white, and blue basketball hidden in the flower bed.
The concrete was cracked and uneven, bent in the shape of a crescent moon. Shots taken from the right side of
the key were from the lawn. Shots from the left were not possible unless you scaled the juniper bush, which was
sometimes required during a heated game of HORSE.
Shooting jumpers was the equivalent of Transcendental Meditation for me. With each snap of the net, I fell
deeper into cosmic consciousness, forgetting more and more of whatever my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Rudig,
said about grammar that day—subjects and predicates.
Invariably, my neighbor across the street, the one who was always working on his truck, Donny Dilbeck, would walk up as he polished off the last of his
drink—a yellow can marked with only four capital letters: “BEER.” Wiping his mouth with the back of his band-aided hand, he’d ask the same question
he always asked. “Hey, Tommy, how ‘bout some one-on-one?”
He was quicker than me, and stronger too, but he was short with stubby limbs. And, while his cowboy boots gave him an extra inch or two, they were
also his Achilles heel. It didn’t take me long to figure out how to steer him toward grease spots left behind by our oil-hemorrhaging Volkswagen
Vanagon. Every time, he would slip, which gave me an opening for an easy steal. That’s when he’d cry out with indignation: “Foul!”
It’s an unspoken basketball norm: you don’t call fouls on kids who are twenty years younger than you, no matter how hard they hack. But, in this case,
I didn’t so much as graze his paper-thin tank top as he drove to the hoop, barreling down the lane for a layup, wild-eyed and out-of-control, slamming
into our aluminum garage door. “Foul!” he’d shout in feigned agony as I watched the solo melodrama unfold from ten feet away. Luckily, he couldn’t
make a free throw if the camshaft in his Ford F150 depended on it.
We always played “loser’s-outs,” so after I scored, he’d get the ball back. That’s when he’d come charging in again, stammering and sputtering and cussing
as his elbows flailed, filling my nostrils with some combination of generic Gemco beer, WD-40, Lucky Strikes, and rust-tinged antifreeze. Clank.
Another miss. “Foul!”
I’d shake my head in disagreement with the call as I watched him amble to the free throw line in his square-toed Laredos, going through his protracted
routine. Three bounces. Spin the ball in his hands. Three more bounces. Mutter something about Larry Bird—“Larry Legend.” Bend his knees. Close his
eyes. Spin the ball. Open his eyes. Stand straight. Bend again. Shoot. Clank.
Once, we both scrambled for a loose ball, our hands hit it simultaneously causing it to rocket through the plate glass window over the kitchen sink. We
kept going though. No use worrying about it. Mom would be at work for another few hours. And we couldn’t end on a tie.
Over the years, I grew vertically while Donny expanded horizontally. Each time the game became more lopsided in my favor. Every once in a while, he’d
get hot at the line and sneak out an upset win, which I would hear about for as long as he could come up with excuses as to why he couldn’t play. “Can’t
today—threw out my back cranking the torque wrench.”
But he could never stay away for long. A few days later, he’d be back calling fouls every time I breathed on him. Clank.
With the whole family working from home these days, our basketball court gets a lot of use. Between editing, and Zoom meetings, and filling out
whatever form has to be filled out, you can often find me out there meditating. Sometimes, my sixth-grade son, Harrison, will come outside between his
online classes—joining me for something we used to call “recess”—to ask a question: “Hey, Dad, how ‘bout some one-on-one?”
As he begins pulling ahead, running up the score, my mind drifts. And I remember how to win. At least every once in a while. “Foul!”
Thank you to everyone who has had a hand in producing this issue of SLO LIFE Magazine and, most of all, to our advertisers and subscribers—we
couldn’t do it without you.
Live the SLO Life!
One-on-One
Tom Franciskovich
tom@slolifemagazine.com
p.s. If you’d like to read more visit me at tomfranciskovich.com
10 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | FEB/MAR 2021